So I don't know how much this is worth, but:
I've been working on the new speedrunning thread for SomethingAwful forums, since our old one is outdated. It's also going to be the TAS discussion thread with how closely linked speedrunning and TASing is these days. For this thread, I've wanted to include lists of example runs and TASes for someone who is mostly new to the concepts.
I considered a number of criteria when I picked these (and I did make use of the Newcomer page and what's been said in this thread when picking some of my examples). I fully realize that my purposes are similar, but not completely identical, to the purposes of the Newcomer page. Preferably, the game should be known. The videos shouldn't be too long, because for someone who isn't already into the thing, it shouldn't be a big project for them to look at an example, so I set a hard limit of one hour. The videos should show gameplay such that it's clear that it's being played at a superhuman level, and it should be possible to understand what the deal is without reading the submission comments. For my purposes, I decided to forgo any input recognition shenanigans like Family Feud or Brain Age, and also didn't find room to include any playarounds. I was originally planning to have the list consist of five TASes, while my example speedruns list had ten runs, but the TAS list ended up with ten runs on it too (and that was the maximum I wanted).
I came up with this.
- Super Mario Bros. 3 in 10:25 by Lord Tom, Mitjitsu and Tompa
- Gimmick! in 07:44 by Aglar and Hotarubi
- Mega Man in 12:23 by Shinryuu and FinalFighter
- Mega Man X1, X2 & X3 300% with one input in 43:51 by agwawaf
- Gunstar Heroes in 31:00 by Samsara
- Super Mario 64 70 stars in 42:58 by CeeSammerZ, coin2884, Eru, Goronem, Jesus, Kyman, Mickey/VIS, Mokkori, Moltov, Nahoc, Nekuran, Nothing693, pasta, Snark, sonicpacker and ToT (as a big example of how TASes are often collaborative works)
- F-Zero X Jack Cup Time Trial in 07:09 by jagg2zero
- 007: Nightfire in 33:42 by FitterSpace, gamerfreak5665 and aleckermit
- Cave Story in 50:10 by nitsuja
- TASBot plays Super Monkey Ball by Cyclopsdragon and Byrz
F-Zero X Jack Cup is an absolutely perfect example of what I was going for - anyone can figure out how a racing game is
supposed to work, will see that what's going on in that video is certainly something else entirely, it's done in a way that a human player couldn't hope to replicate, and it's short. Mega Man X1, X2 & X3 is a fantastic example of something being done with TASing that's out of the ordinary, not really human-replicatable, but still retains the original gameplay. I chose SM64 70 stars over 1 key, because the gameplay in the 1 key run doesn't really resemble Super Mario 64 any longer - it's completely incomprehensible to someone who hasn't kept up with what's happened in Super Mario 64 TASing over the years. 007: Nightfire I picked because it was suggested in this thread, even though I haven't really seen it myself and don't know the game, so I trusted you guys - I considered Goldeneye instead, but I didn't want all my 3D TAS examples to be of N64 games.
And for context, this is my list of example speedruns:
A number of these are marathon runs rather than the world records, entirely because of marathon runs usually having solid commentary to explain what's going on, which was one of the things I was going for.
